The sleaze.

On April 6, Ivanka Trump‘s company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world’s second-largest economy. That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago, her father’s Florida resort.

That’s not a good look. The two facts may have nothing to do with each other, but that’s beside the point. It makes the administration look like sleazy hacks (which they are, but that doesn’t make their looking like that any less destructive), and it makes the … Read the rest

Mike Pence is super mad at North Korea.

Brrr. I wouldn’t want to defy his orders.

The Borowitz Report says it worked.

PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report)—In a major foreign-policy coup for the Trump Administration, North Korea offered to unconditionally abandon its nuclear program on Monday, after Mike Pence spent several minutes angrily squinting at the nation from just across the border.

Warning North Korea that the United States had jettisoned its policy of “strategic patience” and that “all options were on the table,” Pence fixed his steely glare on the isolated Communist nation and began furiously staring it down.

After Pence spent between five and six minutes demonstrating U.S. resolve by squinting indignantly, the government in Pyongyang released

Women are like shoes, or gloves. Shoes don’t make any sense by themselves, they make sense only on feet. Women don’t make any sense by themselves, they make sense only owned by men.

At least that’s how most people in Afghanistan see it.

To escape an abusive marriage, Wida Saghari struggled for five years to finalize a divorce. When it was done, she thought, finally, she could get some peace. Instead, she had stepped into a different kind of hell.

Ms. Saghari, 31, a mother of two who has worked for years as a television host, found that neither Afghan society nor the government sees young divorced women as adults who can function independently of men.

And women also

Originally a comment by morganmine on Why no outrage?

If this was a discussion about how, say, factory workers were exploited (low pay, long hours, dangerous working conditions, etc.) would the “choice” argument still come up? It seems pretty uncontroversial to talk about the exploitation of people working minimum-wage jobs among the left. There seems to be a pretty good understanding that these people are working in these jobs because their options are limited; that having limited options shouldn’t condemn one to unsafe working conditions (because you always have the “choice” to quit, right?); and that these industries should be criticized and held accountable for the way they treat their workers. Why is porn different?

Adult film actresses have talked … Read the rest

Gulalai Ismail a couple of hours ago:

No sane mind should defend blasphemy law onwards, after seeing the implication of making blasphemy a punishable crime no one should ever suggest that their feelings are more worthy than human life. This brutal murder would have never happened if we had taught our children it’s totally okay if someone say something blasphemous, don’t feel hurt with it, it says nothing about your religion or Faith. Engage with them in dialogue and if they don’t listen to you – move on! Your Prophet’s respect won’t be at stake, your religion won’t be at stake with someone doing blasphemy.

I wish more believers listened to fellow believers like Gulalai.

 … Read the rest

Why the March for Science?

Because an unprecedented attack on science, scientists and evidence-based policymaking is underway in the US federal government.

Nowhere is the attack more ferocious than on the issue of global warming, where the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the modest but important policies put in place by President Obama. First among them is the Obama administration’s signature Clean Power Plan, the nation’s first-ever limit on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which Trump has vowed to repeal.He has also pledged to “reopen” (which could well mean “weaken”) hard-won vehicle fuel economy standards that have already begun lowering carbon emissions and oil consumption. Meanwhile, in a tragic example of wilful blindness, Trump has

Gail Dines wonders why the outrage of what was done to David Dao is so obvious while the outrage of what’s done to women in porn is so obscure.

People saw the video, put themselves in Dao’s place, and came to the very sensible conclusion that what they were watching was a level of callous brutality that is unacceptable in a civil society. Andrea Dworkin would not have found our empathy strange because, despite her sadness and anger at the cruelty in the world, she always had faith in the ability for people to do the right thing.

What is strange, however, is that there is no public outcry over porn. You can type “porn” into Google and in 10

I was chatting with latsot on Twitter about worrying or weird or cryptic song lyrics and mentioned Emmylou Harris’s “If You Were a Bluebird” as the most random song lyrics of my acquaintance. So then I decided I needed to revisit them to see, and yes, they’re still that random.

If you were a bluebird you’d be a sad one.
I’d give you a true word
But you’ve already had one.

If you were a bluebird,
You’d be crying
You’d be flying home.

The way Emmylou sings it, it seems to mean something…but then when you think about the words with your brain, you see that there is no something that the words mean. You’ve already had one? You’d be … Read the rest

Foreign Policy on the death of modern Turkey:

The new country called Turkey, quite unlike the Ottoman Empire, was structured along modern lines. It was to be administered by executive and legislative branches, as well as a Council of Ministers composed of elected representatives of the parliament. What had once been the authority of the sultan, who ruled alone with political and ecclesiastic legitimacy, was placed in the hands of legislators who represented the sovereignty of the people.

The yes vote represents a rejection of all that.

The AKP and supporters of the “yes” vote argue that the criticism of the constitutional amendments was unfair. They point out that the changes do not undermine a popularly elected parliament and

Caroline Criado-Perez has some thoughts on Fearless Girl versus Raging Bull, and whether or not artists get to have a veto on artistic responses to their work.

She knows something about statues and women, especially in the UK. The upshot: there are very few statues of women, especially of women on their own; most of the ones there are represent mythical or royal women; this matters.

I will admit to not having counted all the statues in the US, but given the recent news that every statue in statue-filled Sofia is of a man; given there are more statues of animals in Edinburgh than of women; given in New York’s Central Park there are 22 statues of men and

Seen on Facebook:

… Read the rest

Spicey does Passover.

… Read the rest

Hurriyet reports:

Some 51.3 percent of the more than 58 million Turkish voters said “yes” to the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) constitutional amendment package in a tight race to decide on whether to shift to an executive presidential system.

The gap between the two votes stood at around 1.3 million according to midnight figures by the state-run Anadolu Agency. The turnout exceeded 84 percent.

So there will be more Erdoğan, and more and more and more. He’ll never leave.

Authoritarians are on a roll.

The BBC’s Mark Lowen in Ankara:

They are rejoicing into the night here outside the headquarters of the governing AK party (AKP), confident in the victory claimed by President Erdogan.

He and

Nick Cohen looks at the hatred of the nationalist right for George Soros.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump ruled that Americans protesting against him were “professional” agitators. Roger Stone, who has worked for the filthy wing of the right since Nixon’s day, followed up by announcing he had discovered the agitators were “paid for” by none other than Soros.

Now it is commonplace for right-wing Americans to say that only Soros’s corrupt influence can explain why their fellow citizens take to the streets. A typically sly report in the Washington Times said one in three Trump voters believed Soros paid protesters to join the women’s march on Trump’s inauguration day.

One in three Trump voters believe a … Read the rest